Question

I want to create an url out of an array with the help of http_build_query (PHP). This is the Array:

$a = array("skip" => 1, "limit" => 1, "startkey" => '["naturalProduct","Apple"]')

After calling

$s = http_build_query($a);

I get the following string $s:

skip=1&limit=1&startkey=%5B%22naturalProduct%22%2C%22Apple%22%5D

My problem is, that I would need an url like this:

skip=1&limit=1&startkey=["naturalProduct","Apple"]

which means, that I don’t want to convert the following symbols: “,[]

I have written a conversion function which I call after the http_build_query:

str_replace(array("%5B", "%22", "%5D", "%2C"), array('[', '"', ']', ','), $uri);

My question now: Is there a better way to reach the expected results?

Answer 1

My question now: Is there a better way to reach the expected results?

Yes, there is something better. http_build_query^­Docs by default uses an URL encoding as outlined in RFC 1738. You just want to de-urlencode the string. For that there is a function that does this in your case: urldecode^­Docs:

$s = http_build_query($a);
echo urldecode($s);

I hope you are aware that your URL then is no longer a valid URL after you’ve done that. You already decoded it.